And the Winner Is...
Compatibility
This is an easy category to judge. You can
take an ancient Socket 939 system or even the very first
925X PCI-E motherboard and couple that old-ass Prescott
Pentium 4 with a current-generation DirectX 10 card. You
can’t say the same for a quad core. For Intel, you need a
very modern motherboard. And although AMD will likely
offer an upgrade for its AM2 platform, quad-core procs in
AM2 trim aren’t even on this year’s schedule. If you already
have a Quad FX, you probably aren’t itching for a CPU
upgrade just yet. Winner: DX10 CarDDeveloper Support
Does it make sense to make
DX10 capability your number one upgrade
choice when DX10 games are still six
months away? Even scarier, how will today’s
GPUs perform when DX10 games finally
come out? It’s enough to make you want to
pass up that graphics upgrade in favor of a
new CPU. However, CPUs provide a similar
story. How many desktop applications use
the power of a quad core? About a half-
dozen. That’s more apps than DX10 has but
not exactly a compelling case to spend $
right now. Winner: QuaD-Core CpuGPU
NvIDIA GEForCE 8800 GTX
$560, http://www.nvidia.comhead 2 head Two Technologies enTer, one Technology leaves
N
o one—especially us—likes ties, but after sorting out the pluses
and minuses of each technology, neither part has a compel-
ling edge. If you are all about crunching applications—photo editing,
video editing and encoding, or other CPU-heavy chores—the quadcore should be your first upgrade choice. However, if you are a gamer
with a respectable CPU (say any Core 2 Duo or Athlon X2 proc), the
DirectX 10 card is the way to go.round 4
round 5
July 2007 MAXIMUMPC 15